IT’S 40 years ago today since anyone really spent that proverbial penny... since the term bob-a-job made any sense... since the nursery rhyme Sing a Song of Sixpence slipped out of circulation. Yep, 40 years since that other D-Day – Decimalisation Day.

On February 15, 1971, the tanner and the tosheroon, the clod and the Joey*, followed the groat, the sovereign and the farthing into history and a whole new coinage poured into our pockets. We got pees and half pees, 10 pees and 50 pees and not one of them, four decades on, has become sufficiently lovable to earn a nickname like, well, like the tosheroon or the tanner.

No, not even when Lord Fiske, chairman of the Decimal Currency Board, appealed to people to think up slang names for the new coins. He should have realised that you don’t arbitrarily impose a slang name, slang grows naturally and is shaped by time and circumstances. So no wonder the nation’s movers and shakers failed dismally when they tried to inveigle us into calling the tiny ½p a “tiddler”. In no time at all the popular term for this most irritating coin of all was “a flaming nuisance”. It bought nothing, fell through the tiniest hole and was even blamed for instant price rises.

One pensioner complained that her half-crown tin of cat food cost 13p on D-Day instead of the 12½p she’d been told her half-crown was worth. Those ½ps mounted up, she said, complaining that prices were being adjusted to the nearest pee – upwards. And she wasn’t the only one complaining.

Housewives were warned to “exercise your traditional vigilance and belligerence” if there was any danger of a concealed price rise and they did – they were quick to complain when the price of a portion of chips went up to 5p. Blimey, a shilling for a bag of ...chips?

So what were prices like 40 years ago when Ted Heath (remember him?) was Prime Minister and the Park Hall and Capitol were still cinemas, showing Satan’s Skin and Cauldron of Blood on D-Day?

Tea cost 7½p per quarter pound and a 12-ounce tin of corned beef was 23p. Butter was 18p a pound, soup a tanner (see below) a tin and a piece of prime beef for Sunday roast just 30p per pound. You could get a three-bed semi in Whitchurch for under £5,000 and a year-old medium-sized car for about £1,000 – but £20 was a decent wage so work it out.

We’d been given a couple of years to get used to the changeover with 5p and 10p coins introduced as tasters in 1968, used simultaneously with the old, the 50p coin the following year to replace the ten-shilling note. But in 1971 the new swiftly swamped the old. Into circulation came: 50p, 164 million; 10p, 398 million; 5p, 83 million; 1p, 587 million. And for some daft reason no fewer than 391 million of the dreaded ½ps. Altogether, more than two billion shiny new coins.

Shops and supermarkets across South Wales set up inquiry desks to help bewildered customers who were advised by the Echo to “take plenty of small change with you”. They did, working things out with the aid of “decimal adders” handed out in some London stores by scantily-clad young ladies Here To Help.

Even Max Bygraves joined the act, singing a dire ditty called Decimalisation – no, never made the charts – while TV offered a mini-drama called Granny Gets the Point, starring a little old white-haired lady coming happily to terms with the new era.

There were problems for juke box and one-armed bandit operators whose machines wouldn’t accept the new coins. And for people using the city’s public toilets. They had to ask the attendants to change new coins for old pennies, waiting in agony while the attendant worked it out. Bus conductors reported problems with elderly passengers who couldn’t figure out the new coinage but some conductors themselves were a shilling or two short of a quid.

Even churches and chapels were affected. One vicar moaned that instead of the usual half-crown his flock were plonking 10p coins into the collection plate, a loss of sixpence per head, he reckoned.

It cost the country £120m to change a centuries-old tradition and in time two-pound coins appeared while the useless ½p disappeared. Now, stand by for the £5 coin.